To Progress: a bucolic

To those who wish the past returned
and simple life brought back in fashion,
a relationship with the land renewed
and the blight of urban living shunned,
a hundred years of progress dissolved
in the bliss of primitive survival,

Who see the plains of Arcady
As pristine lands, fertile for the tilling,
and in the slow change of the seasons
some majesty of divine balance,
I offer this emetic for nostalgia:

A worn stone lies broken on the grass
in the graveyard at Indian Hill.
Thanks to early hours in freezing rain,
eighty rough acres and pneumonia,
a husband and two sons, gone the same year.